When are points better than cash & vice versa? | Coffee Break Ep39 | 12-31-24
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Smartly Credit Card (with opportunity for up to 4% cash back everywhere) has us wondering...when should you value cash back over other points and miles or transferable currency rewards?
(00:26) - Smartly Credit Card: Up to 4% cash back
Learn more about the Smartly card here.
(01:21) - Using 2x everywhere points card is like buying points for 2 cents each
(05:12) - So, is cash the final answer? No!
(09:07) - So what's the ideal strategy?
(13:36) - Learn more about the Hyatt milestone spending here.
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Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. |
| 0:08.0 | Here we go. |
| 0:16.4 | This is not your typical frequent Miler on the air episode. |
| 0:20.8 | This is a standalone segment we're calling coffee break. |
| 0:24.9 | Each coffee break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. |
| 0:30.3 | And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. |
| 0:34.5 | Enjoy. |
| 0:35.5 | Today's coffee break, when are points better than cash and vice versa? |
| 0:43.3 | So the smartly credit card, which lets you earn up to 4% cashback everywhere, has us questioning |
| 0:51.8 | the value of earning points when we could be earning big cash back instead. |
| 0:58.1 | That's right. We could be earning cash back bigly. And so there's an opportunity there. And it's |
| 1:04.3 | relatively easy for most people to be earning quite a bit of cash back. The top, |
| 1:08.5 | top rate requires a good bit of deposit. But I think for a lot of |
| 1:12.1 | people, this is a pretty accessible way and an important comparison point, I think, to make |
| 1:17.7 | between the different options out there. Yeah. So, you know, for those who can get the 4% cash back, |
| 1:26.0 | you know, there's a big opportunity cost now to using other |
| 1:30.6 | credit cards for rewards. |
| 1:32.7 | For example, when you're earning two points per dollar everywhere, we used to think that |
| 1:37.5 | was fantastic. |
| 1:38.5 | It's still darn pretty darn good. |
| 1:41.9 | But all of a sudden, if you're choosing it to earn two points per dollar |
... |
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